Butterflies
by ignitesthestars
Summary: Fighting, James thinks, is the easy part. Doing your bit for the war effort by hiding and running away is much, much more difficult. Lily and James talk about what it means to protect their son.


"If you stare at that door any longer, I think it might actually burst into flames."

James Potter threw his wife a startled glance. "Really?" He turned back to give the front door a speculative look. Behind him, Lily rolled her eyes.

"No, James. Not really."

The bespectacled man grinned, tearing his eyes away from the door in favour of giving his full attention to the infinitely preferably sight of his wife jiggling their son on her knee. Harry was laughing, a bubbling sort of chuckle that all babies seemed to be born with (their kid did it best, of course), and Lily was ignoring James entirely, directing a gentle smile down at the boy instead.

"You looked at me like that once, you know," he declared.

She kept her gaze on Harry, but James had spent enough time over the years studying her smiles to note the way it changed now, the wry, amused hint that was so often directed at him. "Oh?"

"Yes, it was back in sixth year. I'd just been hit by a bludger to the head and was near comatose on the ground. You looked like all your dreams were coming true."

A small cloud of butterflies Lily had summoned earlier fluttered by to hover somewhere around Harry's left ear; he stopped paying attention to his mother immediately (a travesty, James thought), preferring to stare wide-eyed and suddenly serious at them. "Not quite all of them." She delivered an arch look over their son's head. "After all, I wasn't the one who hit the bludger."

"And Mrs. Potter delivers a direct hit to the ego!" James announced, as Harry reached out and started to swat at the butterflies. "I suppose I should count myself lucky you grew out of that wanting to murder me stage, then?"

"Who said I did?" she replied sweetly, standing and taking Harry with her. She balanced him on one hip, and James took a moment to appreciate the sight of his wife and their son for the umpteenth time that day before Lily headed for the stairs, talking to the baby as she did so. "As for you, mister, it's time for a nap. No, don't give me that look, you know just as well as I do that you're tired and are just going to start grousing for hours if you don't get put to bed soon. Perhaps if you're good..."

She continued speaking until she was out of earshot as James wondered at how the woman was able to keep her tone so even; he all but lost his head when it came to talking to their son, but he'd never caught so much as a hint of baby talk out of Lily. She seemed to think it was condescending.

The front door caught his eye again, and whatever good mood his wife had distracted him into instantly disappeared. It was almost like the bloody thing was staring at him, taunting him with the fact that it was right there, and he couldn't use it. He contemplated kicking it for a moment, before sighing and shaking his head – it wouldn't help, and he'd likely just end up hurting his foot.

"It might not burst into flames, but it's also not going to open." Beneath the amused tone to Lily's voice, he could hear the understanding, and a thin thread of concern she was trying to conceal. Guilt pinched him as her hands slid up his back, looping over his shoulders. He closed his eyes, smiling slightly as he took a moment to enjoy the feel of her pressed against him, the easy comfort of her presence, that familiar, elusive scent that he'd never entirely been able to place.

"I'll stop staring at it soon," he promised, covering her hands with his and squeezing. "It's just going to take some getting used to, is all."

"No, you won't." She cut off his protest before it could even form behind his teeth, tugging her hands from his in order to walk around and stand before him. Her green eyes, piercing as ever, saw right through him. "I _know_ you, James Potter, and the last thing you want to do is be cooped up in this house for the foreseeable future. I can practically see you chomping at the bit, and you all but dive for your wand every time there's so much as a creak outside." She shook her head. "You don't have to pretend it doesn't frustrate you, you know. Lord only knows it's frustrating _me_."

She was right, of course; it was a habit of hers that she'd never quite been able to outgrow. "It's not that I don't love seeing so much of you," he started with a grin, before spotting her raised eyebrow and ruefully allowing that maybe not every conversation needed a joke. He pushed a hand through his hair, an old gesture that was now more a mark of habit rather than any attempt at impressing his wife, and sighed. "You're right, it's frustrating. It's just – I feel useless, you know? Worse than useless, because I know I _can_ be out there fighting, really making a difference, and instead I'm stuck here twiddling my thumbs. Hiding. It feels downright cowardly, to tell the truth, like running away. Even though I know it's not." He made a face. "It doesn't help that I can't even take a walk down to the shops, either."

He was half expecting Lily to laugh at him, even though he knew her better than that. _He_ almost felt like laughing at him, voicing it aloud like that. He knew what they were doing was important, after all. Still—

"The Sorting Hat really did choose well with you, didn't it?" She wasn't laughing at him, of course; she sounded sad more than anything else, and James felt like kicking himself because if there was one thing he hated more than the situation they were in right then, it was his wife being anything less than content and happy. "Gryffindors. Always with the charge first, think later."

"You're as Gryffindor as I am," he pointed out, trying to lighten the mood.

"I know." Lily leaned up, kissing him on the cheek. "We are hiding, James, but we're not running. We're protecting our son. And if I'm honest with you, I would do one hell of a lot more than just run if it mean I could save him."

He kissed her then, properly – none of these namby-pamby cheek kisses (that he really quite enjoyed). He couldn't count how many times he'd done it in the past, but every time he did it now it was like the first one all over again. Or, well – maybe the second. Definitely the third. The first couple of times he'd been a little eager. "I love you, you know that?" he managed to say eventually.

"I've had a vague sort of idea for a while now, yes." She said it with a completely straight face, too, giving him one final kiss before pushing him away and dancing out of reach of his (admittedly grasping) hands. "I'll tell you what. You go and get started on dinner, because I'm absolutely starving, and I'll stay out here in the lounge and try to think of something to take your mind off the situation, hmm?"

He stared at her for a moment, not entirely sure what she was suggesting, but she was already bundling him off towards the kitchen, and now that he remembered it, there was a very interesting contraption in there called an 'oven' that she still hadn't let him use. If he could move quick enough before she remembered—

"And no cooking without magic. I know you think you won't set anything on fire, but you do, every time." And on that not, the door behind him slammed shut with the unmistakeable sound of a locking charm. He half-heatedly pulled out his wand and cast _Alohomora_, but it didn't budge. Typical. She'd always been better at Charms than him. Grumbling – loudly – to himself, he did as she'd asked.

It had helped to mention his frustrations to Lily, but it hadn't really done anything to resolve them. The fact remained that there was a war going almost quite literally outside his front door step, people were risking their lives and dying, and he, James Potter, was cooking some sort of chicken thing behind the most powerful protection enchantments known to wizardkind.

It was a pretty good chicken thing, though. If he did say so himself.

Somewhere in-between his (manly) brooding and his cooking, Lily had unlocked the door again. A plate in each hand, James toed the door open and squeezed back into the room, walking through the grass towards his wife.

There was something wrong about that sentence, something that was almost immediately apparent once he got a proper look at what had once been their living room. For a start, the living room wasn't their anymore. Instead, it had been replaced with a gentle stretch of grass that gradually rolled away to beach, and then lake, all of it bathed in the gentle glow of the full moon. There was a tree near the place where the grass ran out, a red-haired woman lying beneath it and staring up at the stars. The sight was so familiar, James could have etched it out of his own memory.

Logically, he knew that even with magic this was absolutely impossible, and that even as he strolled the distance between the kitchen door (no longer visible) to his wife, he was likely just moving in place in his living, but none of that really mattered. Setting the plates down on a blue-and-white checkered picnic blanket, he flopped to the ground next to Lily.

"This must have taken close to a thousand spells," he told her, unable and unwilling to hide the sheer admiration in his voice.

"Closer to thirty," she informed him, still inspecting the night's sky above them. "Oh bollocks, Orion's belt's all wonky." She flicked her wand, and James managed to glance up in time to see a star wink out and appear in what seemed to be the right place.

"You're amazing, you know that? All I made was dinner. You recreated _Hogwarts_. In the time that I made dinner."

"You're very good at cooking, love." Smiling suddenly, she rolled onto her side and dragged him closer; James had absolutely zero protests, regarding that. "I just thought...if we couldn't go outside, why not bring outside to us? It's not a complete sensory illusion, of course, and it's mostly relying on the fact that – mmph!"

It was a very interesting explanation, of course, but James was really more interested in the very beautiful, wonderful, amazing woman who was really very, very close to him at that point. Lily didn't seem too put out by the whole thing, mouth meeting his in equal passion as her arms dragged him closer; his own hands closed over her hips, sliding across her waist and up her back as he internally lamented the fact that he hadn't started lower, couldn't quite get to bare skin.

"Dinner's going to get cold," he murmured, shifting his weight so she was on her back, dropping biting kisses down the line of her neck.

"You can cook again," she replied on a gasp. "I'll let you use the oven."

One hand drew lower, sweeping down the side of her body to toy with the hem of her dress. It really was rather short. "You put so much effort into this sky, though," he teased, voice low. "You don't want to spend some time star-gazing, maybe? Watching for—"

She surged up against him, and in his surprise, he couldn't stop her from flipping their positions. He caught the triumphant gleam in green eyes before she leaned down to whisper in his ear.

"Orion's belt is wonky, anyway."

Fair enough, James agreed. No arguing with that.

(He was particularly glad he'd had the foresight to place the dinner plates on the far side of the blanket, though).


End file.
